일제강점기 여성교육과 가정개량 담론에 관한 일고찰

Abstract

This study reviewed the discourses on women’s education and household reform handled in Japanese colonial era’s magazines and newspapers and looked at how they were formed. Newspaper and magazine articles dealing with women’s liberation reveal the injustice of women’s situations, arguing that these unequal issues should be addressed. It is argued that women, like men, should equally be guaranteed the right to vote and live as democratic members of society, and that rather than traditional education capitalizing upon the ideal for traditional good-wife-and-wise-mother womanhood, creative and progressive education should be furthered for women based on gender equality and personalism. It points out that such a conservative education for women as the former tends to be grounded basically in male superiority, thus arguing that the education for women should be first and foremost female-oriented based on gender equality and women’s empowerment to improve women’s status in society. Emphasizing the importance of education for women in order to break down the old customs, it can confirm that there develops the discourse on a need for female-oriented household reform. The basis of the household-reform theory lies in that it is necessary to educate women, and only when the mindset of both men and women constituting a whole family can be improved, in order to make an overall makeover of Joseon’s clothing, culinary and residential cultures which still stay unchanged in its old-fashioned mores and conventions. In addition to women’s education, the life-improvement movement played a role as a catalyst for promoting household-reform discourse among then intellectuals and new women.